Dallas, Houston tweet more about church than beer

Texans on Twitter aren’t afraid to tell you what’s on their minds, whether that’s a Bible verse or their bar order.

In Dallas and Houston, Twitter users mention church more than beer, according to analysis conducted by FloatingSheep and reported by CNN Belief.

The church-beer divide is most prevalent in Dallas, where the number of church tweets in a weeklong period was more than double the number of beer ones. And sorry, St. Arnold’s, there were “much more church” tweets than beer tweets in Houston, too.

San Francisco was the city where the margin skewed most toward beer.

From the CNN piece:

“We found out that there is a geography to what people tweet about, and there are some geographic differences to Twitter,” said Dr. Matthew Zook, a geography professor at the University of Kentucky and co-founder of Floating Sheep. “You have these offline cultural differences that are being replicated in information space like Twitter.”

The group went through roughly 10 million geotagged tweets from June 22 to June 29 and found that 17,686 tweets were sent with the word “church,” while 14,405 tweets were sent containing the word “beer.”

The findings that church beat out beer nationally on Twitter come as more churches are welcoming iPhones and iPads during worship, developing their own apps and using social media to connect with members and the community.

One tech-savvy pastor points out that Christians tweeting is actually biblical: “Like a swallow, like a crane, so I twitter…” (Isaiah 38:14).

The researchers used beer and church to indicate cultural differences, but the divide might not be as clear-cut as you’d think; plenty of Christians tweet about both.

Although church was the more popular Twitter term in Dallas and Houston — home to big name megachurches and sizable evangelical and Baptist populations — the results varied across the state, and there were pockets of beer-tweeters as well. Is that Austin and College Station I see in blue?